If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

[VS] "Outfit chat / meeting" See post for time & minutes

Agenda:
1. Updates on previous meeting
1.1 LogoWe're getting close. This just serves as a reminder to go check the forum post. I would like a decision within the week...

1.2 The Website"Submit an Event" setup. Any suggestions on how we publicise the outfit calendar are welcomed

1.3 Training sessionsThe ball is finally rolling. Most of this is being discussed in a meeting tonight (Tuesday). This serves as a reminder to keep pushing for this and a thank you for those organising it.

1.4 Outfit guideHas started. Go to the thread to get involved.

1.5. Channel size / splitting commsRefer to section on TACGIR

1.6. The Vanu Accord
Feedback from Cooper on the meeting scheduled for Tuesday night with other TVA leaders.

1.7 PL mentoringSome feedback on this welcomed. What can we do to improve this and make it more common?

2. TACGIRWe have a new body within the outfit known as the Tactical Giraffes (TACGIR).
This section will serve to introduce TACGIR and its leaders, answer any questions about it and setup a basic framework on how it will work (channels, how to join, how to start a TACGIR session etc.)

3. The Vanu Accord
There is consistent grumblings about TVA. What can we do that esnures we get the most out of TVA?

1.1 The logo
YouTube website and www.rockplanetshotgun.com need discussing.
Primarily: We need to decide upon a logo. A lot of ideas have been thrown out and played about with. I will brieflymention this and point people towads the thread.

1.2PUG platoons. Have worked well. We will now be running them as "The Vanu Accord" public platoons (see why below). We need: Some basic guidelines. We will write these out during the meeting.

1.3Comm systems
We did not get a chance to trial the two different systems suggested due to the "call to arms" night. Let's organise it so that we properly trial them in the two weeks after this meeting.
1.4The website
Very rough draft out now at www.rockplanetshotgun.com. Aside from logo as above, what do we want here? What pages do we need, what edits do we need of what is there?
2. New items2.1. Feedback from TVA chat with Stanis & UBAD peopleI will report back from a pretty intensive chat with UBAD folks and Stanis a couple of weeks ago. A few things came out of this.

1) The liason role we have running is really, really appreciated by the others. They will try to get other people doing something similar, but the small size of the outfits makes the chances of them having people willing is low.

2) The liason role when extends to the whole empire (i.e: not just RPS and other outfits, but organising information exchange across multiple squads) is very similar to the 'general' role a few CR5s took on in PS1. It involves using command chat and in game tells and orders to direct the zerg, suggest movements to other platoons, share information across the empire. I've done it a few time, as have others. It is basically the keystone to an empire working together. We have people here willing to do this, we should both push it and start sharing what we know about taking this role on.
3) All TVA members will be being contacted to try and get them to more regularly use command chat and coordinate. Our efforts here are, again, very appreciated. We should discuss how we make an effort working more closely with outfits like MDk and IVRI we have worked with before.

4) Public platoons are to be run as "The Vanu Alliance - Public Platoon" or somethig similar. This allows us to draw in SLs from across outfits, provides a "holding space" for members of small outfits with few people on and gets the TVA name out there.

2.2 Training sessions
Came up last time, but nothing's happened.

We need this. Out average skill level on the field is, in all honesty, not that great. I am comfortable with this. We don't filter by ability and we don't (and we never should) expect people to be amazing at the game.

What we need training on are things like basic FPS combat. PS2 has a very specific FPS 'feel' that does not sit comfortably with me. I am, in all honestly, really very shit at the "shooting stuff with lasers" bit of the game. Anyone who feels they are good at this aspect of the game please, please step forward and put together a small tutorial / training session.

We could also do with training / practice on things like coordinated gal drops, movement as an armour group that does not end up with us piling over one another, maybe some scythe stuff.

I envisage these sessions as 1-2 hour affairs. Maybe that take place in part in the VR area. I don't think it helps us to decide upon a given night for these to happen as those who are willing / capable to train should be able to say when is best for them. But this can be discussed. Ideally the outcome of this point of discussion are a number of dates / times of training sessions in the coming weeks that can be advertsied to the outfit.

(The above sections 1 & 2should be done fast. No more than 20 mins if possible. There's big stuff to chat about)

3. The Big Stuff

3.1 An Outft "Manifesto"
We need to decide:
1) Who we are here for
2) What we exist for
3) An outfit "style"

To my mind this is best written up as a (short) manifesto. We can hash one out as a group.

3.2 Outfit Guidelines
For:
1) Communications (RIDE and others have written much about this. I will pull out example guidelines and we will finalise them and host them on www.rockpapershotgun.com and discuss how best to make sure we stick to them by encuraging people to act a certain way rather than regimenting it.)

2) Player behaviour (and what to do if people are not excellent). Wibb and Eso get the kudos here. Let's have a short chat about their work.

3.3 Channel size
Shall we just nominate a size? Of is there something better we can do?

3.4 TVA
If we have time, and if not covered in the feedback I will provide.

---------------

1st regular "Outfit Chat" on Saturday 02/03/2012 at 7pm GMT.Where: Mumble
What: See belowWho: Anyone & everyone
(Really. This doesn't work if it's a tiny group of us.)

(Why Saturday: it's to avoid drawing a specific 'crowd' related to the usual outfit nights but also to assure a good number of people are available.)

There is a fuckload of discussion on these forums about the outfit. This is good.

However I have always preferred chatting about things if decisions need to be made. Preferably face-to-face, but that's not gonna happen, so Mumble it is.

The outfit has grown in a largely unstructured way. This is excellent. It means there's not one person or even a small group of people defining and determining how the outfit 'feels'. But we are also fucking huge. Bigger than I realised. Which means we do need more in the way of basic guidelines / rules so that there is some consistency from one night to the next.

So. Agenda. Please add suggestions below. try to avoid actually discussing these below because, well, that's what's the meeting for. Feel free to keep discussing these things on the relevant threads though. These meetings aren't supposed to replace the forums but rather replace the current system when every now and then I put up a post that announces "how things are to be" and intervene in discussions with something a bit more organic.

Agenda for first meeting (to be updated with suggestions)

1. Communications & orgsanisation (over Mumble)- Friends of the outfit channel. What does this need to be? (Is the current setup where it's users & leader do?)

- Leadership comms. What should the 'basic setup' be for this. We need something (fairly simple client-side) that every SL & PL can setup and use which can then be added to if they wish in a way that neither undermines the basic setup no requires SLs and PLs to fiddle about. What should this basic setup be? (I have some ideas that involve Mumjble's arcane ACL magic which I will suggest and try out as well)

- Large, busy, casual nights. Does the 'overflow' to Special Giraffes work, or do we need some guidelines on this? How do we avoid undermining both the leadership of those in PL positions on busy nights and the desire many have to have large chatty channels but also get something that those who hate those same busy channels can use. Special giraffes was intended to solve this. I'm not sure it is. Can we arrange comms in such a way that this happens more naturally?

- Leadership in large channels. What can be done to improve QoL for leaders of those huge nights? There was, of course, "that night" a few weeks ago that come to mind. But, in general, leadership of huge platoons is difficult anyway, let alone from the point of view of those recieving orders. What can we change with Mumble & what guidelines do we need (if any) about leadership on these nights?

2. PUG platoons run by RPS
- Feedback on those that have been run so far. What works & how. Do we keep doing these, do we try top step up how often we do them?

- Draft some guidelines on "how to run a PUG platoon" so that it a) works in-game and b) works in synergy with the outfit platoon(s)

3. Allies & Vanu on Miller in general
- How are things going with our allies? Who are we making good progress with?

- How have things gone when we've had outfits join our platoons? Should we have some guidelines about this (i.e: Getting their leaders into our Mumble so they are part of our leadership comms?)

- Possible Miller-community-forum. It's something I've been thinking about. I'm going to have a chat with people in the new Miller TS and report back on that.

- Recruitment? Do we? How? What have we got / what will we be getting to be able to ask for a possible rps feature like the other one?

I won't be there.
But there's one thing I'd like to see brought up, if anybody has any feelings about this other than me:

Outfit identity/purpose. I've opposed active recruiting in game or on official forums/reddit/etc, as to me the Rock Paper Shotgun community Outfit should be just that - an outfit for people from the Rock Paper Shotgun community to play Planetside 2 together. Obviously we're going to acquire people from elsewhere as we go along as well, but the core purpose idea is to be somewhere RPS readers can play together. I think some other people might like it if Rock Planet Shotgun simply set out to be the biggest, strongest outfit it can be in the game. It's just something I'd like thought about.

I won't be there.
But there's one thing I'd like to see brought up, if anybody has any feelings about this other than me:

Outfit identity/purpose. I've opposed active recruiting in game or on official forums/reddit/etc, as to me the Rock Paper Shotgun community Outfit should be just that - an outfit for people from the Rock Paper Shotgun community to play Planetside 2 together. Obviously we're going to acquire people from elsewhere as we go along as well, but the core purpose idea is to be somewhere RPS readers can play together. I think some other people might like it if Rock Planet Shotgun simply set out to be the biggest, strongest outfit it can be in the game. It's just something I'd like thought about.

I'll add possible recruitment to the list.

I'm of the opinion we avoid pushing this too hard. I'm happy for those who join PUG platoons and want to know more having a look-see, but [RPS] will always be, first and foremost, a place for readers of rps to get together to play planetside 2. If there is any active recuitment it should be by asking nicley for a front-page feature before anything else. But we can discuss this.

"Quantacat's name is still recognised even if he watches on with detached eyes like Peter Molyneux over a cube in 3D space, staring at it with tears in his eyes, softly whispering... Someday they'll get it."

The key ones for me are the mumble comms setup and how this affects specific nights. Ive already suggested a method for this which I believe would solve the issue, the only problem is that it requires setting up like 10 different whispers.

As for recruiting, I guess we will see what others opinions are, but I agree that it should be left as it is.. Word of mouth, public interest etc work well and keep out the people who would just do us harm. Additionally, if we continue to grow, a leadership or class system would be necessary (moreso than we have now) which isnt what we want, I assume.

I'll still be op'ing this show, which is where I've been all week. (and it's dreadful). My 2c is for:

Comms to be as easy as possible and simple to explain/setup.

We need to be very careful about hiving off too many of our long term members/experienced leaders into "special" units, especially on public night, but that needs to be balanced with specific people wanting to play together. (and if we all want to just play together then why hold a public night at all?).

Backseat PLing should be punishable by firing squad.
But it must be made easy, and encouraged, for people to pass off PL in a non-judgmental way if they are just out of ideas or not feeling it.

Recruiting should be subtle rather than /yell "Join us". The forum/mumble/friend of a friend would seem to offer the best chance of getting people of an RPS mindset.

Outfit purpose - At some point we are going to have to address the central question of are we playing for the giggles or to win. Having nights where we do one or the other is fine by me, but it does seem to frustrate people on their "off" nights.

Just to lob a bomb - We have hundreds of members, should we cull (or calf) inactives? They are presumably playing "unsupervised" with our RPS tag on.

Grible: I and a few others can't stand the comms on public night but would like to play the game as well. Hence delta force. Since I limit it to a squad - not a platoon like I did that one time - I dont see the harm. There are plenty of vets in the main platoon and channel.

The same goes for standard nights - sometimes it's way chatty and I can't stand it. Since it never goes through or is met with loud NOs I don't like to propose splitting. Hence delta force. It's the best solution for all involved as we also have a right to play the game our way, even on, our not set in stone, standard nights.

@Ridebird
Never meant to imply you couldn't play the game how ever you want, when ever you want. I also don't disagree at all with the delta setup! I fully understand that people have different tolerances for 'too chatty' and completely respect the desire to split out when it gets too much.

@Paul
I'm not really saying "we should do this". I just thought I'd mention it since we commonly refer to other outfits as a mass - they must do to us too.

@All
I think it comes back to the character of the outfit, play to win, play to giggle, play to cert. Often all three come together - most nights in fact - sometimes they divide and that is when tensions happen.

@All
I think it comes back to the character of the outfit, play to win, play to giggle, play to cert. Often all three come together - most nights in fact - sometimes they divide and that is when tensions happen.

Yeah, got a bit worried when you mentioned 'outfit purpose'. In my opinion it's all three, the ratio of which varies night by night. Guess it is the degree to which we pursue each one that needs discussed.

On the logo issue note, given that youtube/logo has become partially my area: It may be a good idea for people to have a trawl through the youtube thread to look at ideas before the meeting to speed this discussion up... Add any thoughts you like too.

Pay particular attention to the last few images by cooper; namely the sideways giraffe head by rizlar that uses the purple background and green circle proposed by myself taking the propeganda poster style into account. The last few were a very good representation of the direction I myself thought the logo should head in....

We need to establish if people are happy with this as a 'sort of' executive decision, by which I mean decided by the few of us that have had input so far, or if people want to have a week or so to submit new ideas.

As far as the background goes... the current idea is to go with rizlars proposed idea and work it into something that we can use across all related pages.

Finally, whether we go with the traditional, or new (if a tad bland) youtube banner style.

"Quantacat's name is still recognised even if he watches on with detached eyes like Peter Molyneux over a cube in 3D space, staring at it with tears in his eyes, softly whispering... Someday they'll get it."

Yes, and so did others that I talked to. So let's just chuck it out there - BasicPauly and MrEclectic, can you leave a bit more room for others? You answered pretty much everything last time and talked for a majority of the meeting. Quite often when people tried to speak you cut them off.

It wasn't that nice, and for the meetings to be good we need to have a lot of speakers.

"Quantacat's name is still recognised even if he watches on with detached eyes like Peter Molyneux over a cube in 3D space, staring at it with tears in his eyes, softly whispering... Someday they'll get it."